...Before Coca-Cola hired Haddon Sundbloom in 1931 to come up with an advertising campaign, with "Santa" drinking a Coke, dressed in the colors of Coke's logo. Once an image gets on a billboard and into magazines, it's hard to get it out of the culture.

Here's a discription of Belsnickle ("Santa Claus's" predecessor in the Americas), from the Pennsylvania newspaper, The Pottstown Lafayette Aurora, dated December 21, 1826 (180 years ago, today):*

He has the appearance of a man of 50, and is about 4 feet high, red round face, curly black hair and a long beard ... and is constantly laughing, which occasions his chunky frame to be in perpetual shake. ...This genus of the night winds and storms is, when at a distance, entirely non-discript; but when he approaches, his uncouth magnitude deminishes, and you can accurately survey his puncheon frame from top to toe. His cap, a queer one indeed, is made of black bearskin, and fringed round, or rather stuck round with porcupine quills painted a fiery red, and having two folds at each side, with which he, at pleasure covers his neck and part of his funny face. ... His outer garment, like Joseph's of old, is of many colors...

[ETA]: And here's a less literary rememberence from someone who played one of the Belsnickles in Pennsylvania around 1800:

I went belsnickling several times when I was young. We went to every house in half a township where the poor children were. When we had given what we could get from people who could afford it better, we went in some of the big farm houses for fun. ... When we were done visiting the poor children and scared many of them before we did give them the things, we made our headquarters on the farm. We had fiddles and other music.

.*

Belsnickle (or Pelsnichol) came to Pennsylvania with the German immigrants (the name comes from the German for "Furry Nicholas"), and the American illustrator Thomas Nast was also a German immigrant; he drew on his own memories of Belsnickle when he started illustrating images of Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly, starting in 1862; here's an eexample. You'll note that he's still got that bearskin cap described in the Lafayette Aurora article, though he's ditched the porcupine quills and his beard's gone white over the intervening 17 years (beards will do that, after all).

*I've snipped both of these quotes from Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men, by Phyllis Siefker (McFarland & Company, Inc. 1997)